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musings of a twenty-first century stoic

Modular Design

One of the main benefits of our new design is that it is made of seven independent printed circuit boards, which can be developed in parallel. Some will be developed by ourselves, others are available off-the-shelf, and the remaining ones will be outsourced to trusted subcontractors. The diagram above has been updated with expected board dimensions.

Power Supply Unit

This board will be designed by a partner.

Backplane

We will have to develop this PCB by ourselves, but it should be quite easy. It won’t contain any complex components, and it will be 100% digital. It will mostly serve as support for the 4 Parallella boards (with mesh network) and for the touchscreens, knobs, buttons, faders, bargraphs, and LEDs. The main challenge will be a mechanical one, making sure that all components will fit within our enclosure. For that purpose, we have increased the height of the frontplate to 40 mm.

CV I/Os

We will have to develop this board as well, with two AD7606 and one AD5360. From a hardware standpoint, this will be the hardest part of the project for us, since it will deal with mixed signals and include fairly complex components. We are likely to seek some external help in order to get it right. In the meantime, we will develop some prototypes with evaluation boards, then with breadboards. We will also work with some industrial design engineers who will help us for the folding mechanism.

AVB Switch

The AVB Switch will be sourced from MOTU. There, we will have to figure out how to properly integrate the harvested PCB with our power supply unit. We will also manufacture short Cat 6 cables and route them neatly within our enclosure. In a perfect world, we would put all the required electronics on the backplane, but I don’t want to add this level of complexity to our project at this stage of the game, so we’ll go Frankenstein for a while.